Not-So-Dark Materials

This past weekend, I got out to a movie theater again for the first time in several weeks, and saw The Golden Compass. I'd read the book years beforehand -- before a movie studio had even picked up the rights to adapt it, in fact. That series, His Dark Materials, is really great.

How the books came to be considered "children's books" in so many literary critiques is a real mystery to me. I don't say this as any sort of snobbish "it's too good to be a kids' book" way, because I don't think quality has anything to do with audience. But just because the main character is a child hardly means that's the primary intended reader.

In any case, I was very nervous to see how a book I'd enjoyed so much would be adapted into a film. The results were a bit mixed, I'd have to say.

As you've probably read if you follow entertainment news, much of the "message" of the story had been scrubbed away. That message, by the way, is not really anti-God, despite what you might have heard -- it's more anti-organized religion. In any case, I'd expected that material to be stripped away, and so it was. This was disappointing to me, but I must admit that this first installment of the trilogy didn't suffer too much from the loss.

If anything, the story simply didn't have enough room to breathe from a pacing standpoint. Details about the world, its magics, its politics, and its primary conflicts -- which are revealed gradually in the book -- are rolled into a huge monologue at the start of the film, crumbling under the weight of exposition. It feels artless to me as a reader of the book, and yet at the same time it left me wondering how well anyone who hadn't read the book would find their feet afterward.

From there, it bounced from event to event at a furious pace. It was as though the screenwriter was committed to cutting as few subplots as possible from the book, choosing instead to whittle every single plot point down to its bare bones just to be sure of getting it in there somewhere. Most of it was realized pretty well on the screen, but when combined with the stripping away of some of the book's subtext, it felt too much like the movie was trying to satisfy viscerally and not intellectually.

But there were good elements, to be sure. The casting was uniformly excellent. The young girl playing the lead character of Lyra was a solid actor. Nicole Kidman was a deliciously sweet villain that, in any other year that hadn't had Imelda Staunton as Delores Umbridge in a Harry Potter film, would have been a really outstanding performance. Daniel Craig made the most of a role that doesn't really grow large until later books in the series. (Well... or the very dark ending of the actual book, which was "postponed" from the finished film, given the uncertainty of there being any sequels.) Ian McKellen voices a great Iorek, and his opposite number from The Lord of the Rings, Christopher Lee, does a great cameo as (what else?) a power-hungry villain.

The CG used to realize the characters' "daemons" is generally pretty strong. Even though some of these animals are more commonplace things like dogs or insects, the filmmakers seemed to go for rendering even these on a computer -- and I thought this a wise choice, since it gave an overall consistency, where sometimes using real animals would probably have made the not-as-good CG moments more jarring.

In all, I'd have to say it was a good movie. It's just a much better book still. I give it a B.